So many minds.So many possibilities.A piece of Japanese photography history in your hands

Bridging Cultures

Photographs can be viewed on backlit screens, but they truly come to life when held in your hands. The Japanese Photography Project (JPP) Portfolio Series showcases the work of prominent and historic Japanese photographers through the art of the collotype, a traditional printing method known for its true continuous tones. Each portfolio edition, carefully curated around a specific theme and time period in Japanese photography history, consists of just 500 volumes. Beautifully written forewords and comprehensive biographies add another layer to the work by offering an expert take on the photographs’ historical and artistic influences.

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Inaugural Volume

The Provoke Generation: Rebels in a Turbulent Time

The debut volume in this series, The Provoke Generation: Rebels in a Turbulent Time, captures Japan during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s through the lens of the era’s most innovative photographers. Post-war art of the 60s was both politically charged and sensually vibrant, and for many Japanese photographers, the blurred, grainy qualities of are-bure-boke epitomized the unrest and dissatisfaction with tradition at the time. This collection includes photographers featured in the short-lived avant garde art magazine Provoke alongside protest photography and photography from the female minority perspective of the time period.

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Rule-Breaking Photographers

As some of the most rebellious and revolutionary artists of their day, the photographers featured in Volume One of our Portfolio Series forever transformed the modern art of the image. Click on each tab below to learn a bit more about these key figures.

Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama once said he wanted to “destroy photography” with his work. In a way, he did, crushing the traditional idea of photography with images shot from a moving car to blurred nudes. Moriyama is known for upending traditional photography with raw street photos and defying conventions like sharpness and soft light.

He joined Provoke for their second issue, publishing two Warhol-inspired series along with a set of nudes shot at a hotel. The now prolific photographer would eventually describe his work with the publication as both traumatic and stimulating..

Takuma Nakahira

Takuma Nakahira believed photography had the power to open up a “limitless world”. Together with art critic Koji Taki, he founded Provoke from a shared belief in the way photography influenced perception. His blurred, grainy photographs became an iconic Japanese style in the late 1960s.

For Nakahira, photography moved beyond what could be constructed with words, and he often let the camera do the talking with a wide angle lens and by shooting blind without the viewfinder.

Yutaka Takanashi

Yutaka Takanashi balanced out the soft and grainy styles characteristic of much of the work featured in Provoke with a sharp, more methodical style he brought from his career in commercial fashion. The photographer, however, shared a similar understanding of the power of photography.

While his work with Provoke deviated from his commercial work, Takanashi went on to have a photography career nearly five decades long, often known for shifting his method between each project and using a range of different films and mediums.

Kazuo Kitai

Kazuo Kitai is an art school dropout who went on to create images in the are-bure-boke style, an approach completely counter to the images seen in his textbooks. This grainy, out-of-focus approach gave his images a unique perspective that further fueled his ongoing innovation.

His anti-traditional style contributed to his ongoing fascination with protest photography, a key theme amidst the unrest of the 1960s. Later in his career, he moved on to photograph rural communities as urbanization took root in Japan in the 70s.

Hitomi Watanabe

Hitomi Watanabe’s photography career launched while the two-year protests at Tokyo University took place during the Zenkyoto Movement in the late 60s. As the only photographer given access to the protests from behind the barricades, her images from the point of view of the protestors were one of a kind.

While she continued photographing the aftermath of the protests for two years, her natural muse later led her through multiple genres of photography, from portraits to wildlife.

Miyako Ishiuchi

Miyako Ishiuchi spent her childhood near an American military base in post-war Japan. Evan as a young girl, Ishiuchi was both fascinated by Western culture and afraid of the dominant male presence on the military base.

A self-taught photographer, her work was influenced by early schooling in textiles alongside the photography of Shomei Tomatsu and Daido Moriyama. Her major works span from the 70s to present day and are displayed worldwide.

Insightful Curation

Crafting a breathtaking art book requires the assembly of an expert team of curators. The inaugural volume of the Portfolio Series reflects the curatorial brilliance of three key figures. Simon Baker, a groundbreaking Curator of Photography at the Tate Modern, Baker wrote one of the volume’s introductory essays, and he also worked closely with Ryuichi Kaneko and Kotaro Iizawa, both leading historians of Japanese photography, to carefully curate this volume’s works.

In an effort to ensure that the images selected were representative of each artist’s individual approach, Baker, Kaneko, and Iizawa selected four images from the three most important bodies of work for each artist. The result is a compendium that is both varied and yet offers a sense of continuity in regard to each artist’s approach.

Collotype Craftsmanship

Collotype printing is renowned not only for the quality of images it produces but also for its fascinating heritage. Developed in the mid-1850s by French photographer Alphonse Louis Pointevin (1819-1882), collotype printing soon became a favorite among photographers for the rich tonal gradation and delicate details that the method could capture.

Collotype printing thus became the gold standard for photography studios around the world. By the dawn of the 20th century, though, many workshops had shifted to the trendy method of offset lithography, which was cheaper than collotype alternatives. As a result, the number of studios using the collotype technique began to dwindle; today, the technique is incredibly rare.

Established in Kyoto in 1905, the Benrido Collotype Atelier brings over a century of experience to image-making. As one of the world’s few remaining producers of collotypes, Benrido offers rare access to this lost craft, providing opportunities for today’s photographers to collaborate with master artisan printers in making singularly beautiful museum-quality prints for exhibition and display.

Along with local papermakers and bookbinders, the Benrido craftsmen have upheld a tradition of superior Kyoto artisanship for more than a century, creating and preserving thousands of Japanese national treasures and cultural artifacts. Now that new technologies have all but driven collotypes to extinction, the Benrido studio provides photographers of the digital age with the opportunity to realize their creative visions using this rare process.

Artful Writing

Photographs transcend language as a universally understood art form. By pairing images with expert analysis, however, the work can become more multi-layered. Understanding the photographer’s background and motivation, as well as how their work influenced later art, helps to build a deeper understanding. This inaugural Portfolio Series volume seeks to cultivate this knowledge by including two spectacular introductory essays written by leading scholars in their respective fields. Executed in exceptional letterpress prints, these artfully written forewords are an ideal accompaniment to the photographs themselves.

Simon Baker

Simon Baker, the Tate’s first Curator of Photography, offers the first of these forewords. Entitled “Provoke: Provocative Materials for Thought,” Baker weaves together the various strands of photographic innovative as exemplified in the work of the Provoke photographers. Explaining why Provoke became so synonymous with this generation, Baker reveals to the reader just how avant-garde these artists were for their time.

Excerpt from: “PROVOKE: Provocative Materials for Thought”

“In the history of photography, . . . it is not often that the name of a short-lived magazine comes to define not only a visual style (that most closely associated with its contents), but also to stand for a radical new representational form of a complex medium like photography. This, it would seem, is exactly what has happened to “provoke”: a word that seems to have transcended its original designation as the narrow definition of a discrete range of images and texts, and has somehow come to stand for Japanese avant-garde photography in general from the late 1960s into the 70s. In the Anglophone world in particular, describing “provoke” almost as a defined movement (something that artists subscribed to, like surrealism) or signature style (grainy, blurry, out of focus) has become commonplace, [yet] we are referring to something that only seems in retrospect to have been in the air at the time as such.”

John Dower

John Dower, an emeritus professor of Japanese history from MIT, contributes the second essay, which grapples with the complex history that faced the people of Japan in the turbulent 1960s and 70s. Complementing Baker’s respective artistic analysis, Dower elaborates upon the difficult tensions that faced Japan during this period as it emerge from wartime and faced a new modern world altogether.

“When Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics in October 1964 it was an occasion of wonderment for much of the world, including the Japanese themselves. Twenty years earlier, the nation had entered the final year of a horrendous war of aggression that began with the invasion of China in 1937 and ultimately claimed the lives of several tens of millions of Chinese and other Asians, and as many as three million Japanese. In October 1944, Japan was about to experience war brought home with a vengeance. U.S. air raids commenced late that year, and within a short time were redirected to target densely populated urban centers. Between March and August of 1945 this saturation bombing devastated 66 cities, ending with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The imperial government surrendered on August 15. The country lay in ruins, at least one-quarter of its prewar wealth destroyed.”

Detailed Design

Each 8 by 10 photograph included in the inaugural Portfolio Series volume offers a glimpse into history while also revealing why these artists forever influenced the art of photography. With each frame rendered in the traditional collotype printing method, the volume offers a stunning array of images as they were meant to be seen: in your hands.

The beauty of this edition goes beyond its 72 breathtaking collotypes: it also includes letterpress-printed biographies of the included artists and contextual essays by experts in the field of Japanese history and photography. These exquisite materials are then combined in a custom-finished box that works for both preservation and presentation.

Unboxing of the Portfolio

Check out this unboxing video to see what's really inside of this mysterious black box: practically a whole universe.

Make it Your Own

Receiving your very own piece of history should be a personal experience. So why would we want each portfolio to be exactly the same?

Make your portfolio your own by choosing from different finishes, cover photos, and even edition number if you like. Have fun trying out different combinations on our interactive order page to find the look you connect with the most.

The Provoke Generation: Japanese Photography, 1960s-1970s is a limited run of 500 copies, which means the time to invest in this first installment won’t last for long. Don’t miss your chance to capture this moment. Start designing your portfolio today.